The National Association for the Education of Young Children has put
together a list of ideas of summer activities for caregivers and children to do together. Most of these activities are free and incorporate fun and learning.

Here's a scary thought: 42,819 5-year-olds -- 1 percent of all kindergarteners -- are home taking care of themselves after school. The Afterschool Alliance reports that while most children are in the care of an adult after school, millions of elementary and secondary school kids spend an average of 7 hours a week caring for themselves. Only 11 percent are in after-school programs, though many more would participate if they could afford them or find suitable programs in their community.

Since 1983, the nation has observed National Physical Fitness and Sports Month during the month of May. It's an opportunity to draw attention to physical activity as an integral part to a healthy and productive life and celebrate participation in sports and hundreds of physical activities, reports the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports.

The National Collaboration for Youth offers toolkits supporting the need for partnerships between schools and community-based organizations.

To promote high quality research in child care and early education and its use in policymaking, the National Center for Children in Poverty, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan, and the Child Care Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services have launched the National Center for Child Care and Early Education Research Connections Web site. Designed to serve researchers and policymakers, the site is built on a relational database and includes a searchable research collection, data sets for secondary analysis, specially developed syntheses, and a 50-state data tool to compare policies within and across states.

This article in Pediatrics, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children," examines the first-ever study linking early television watching with later attention and concentration problems. Researchers from the University of Washington found that, for children age 3 and younger, every hour of television they watched led to a 10-percent increase in the likelihood of attention problems at age 7. Even before their first birthday, kids watch more than 2 hours of television a day.

The release of the early evaluation of 21st Century Learning Centers sparked heated debate as to what after-school programs should be held accountable for and how they should measure their impact. This Harvard Family Research Project's "Out-of-School Time Evaluation Snapshot" provides a comprehensive listing of the performance measures that programs nationwide are using, and the sources they use to collect data.

As national concerns over the quality of child care increase, nonprofit organizations are taking the lead in developing innovative programs to improve early care and education. This Urban Institute research brief looks at North Carolina's TEACH initiative, which is a model for other states.

Although targeting the youngest learners (at ages when the brain develops rapidly) pays off, most education money goes to older children. A report from the Child and Family Policy Center of Iowa and Voices for America's Children finds 13.7 cents of every per-child public education dollar goes to younger kids. Congress is debating a $1.2 billion increase in the Child Care and Development Block Grant's annual appropriation, a move that would increase investments in early learning by $34.57 per young child in America. A $400 million increase in Head Start funding would translate to a $17.29 increase in per young child funding.

This recent CDC survey of 9 to 13-year-olds and their parents sets the baseline for efforts to increase physical activity among kids. The majority of kids (61 percent) reported no organized physical activity like sports, and almost a quarter (23 percent) said they engaged in no active play during out-of-school hours. Parents said transportation problems, lack of local opportunities, expense, lack of parental time and concerns about neighborhood safety were part of the problem.